Temple

by Matthew Reilly

  Nash handed Race an earpiece and a wraparound throat microphone. Race had only ever seen them on TV before, on footage of SWAT units. You strapped the throat mike around your neck and the microphone picked up the vibrations of your voice box.

  “Put it on as soon as you get in the car,” Nash said. “It’s voice-activated, so all you have to do is talk and we’ll hear you. If you get in any trouble, just say the word and Van Lewen here will be at your side in seconds. You got that?”

  “Got it.”

  They came to the western entrance of the university, where two more Green Berets stood guard at the door. Nash and Race stepped past them, out into the pouring rain.

  It was then that Race saw “the car” that Nash had said was waiting out front.

  On the gravel turnaround in front of him stood a motorcade.

  Four police motorcycle outriders—two at the head of the line of cars, two at the rear. Six plain-looking olive-colored sedans. And wedged in the middle, cocooned by the outriders and the sedans, were two heavy-duty armored vehicles—Humvees. Both were painted black and they each had deeply tinted windows.

  At least fifteen heavily armed Green Berets stood with M-16s at the ready all around the motorcade. The pouring rain hammered down against their helmets. They didn’t seem to notice.

  Nash hurried over to the second Humvee and held the door open for Race. Then he handed Race a thick manila folder as he stepped inside the big vehicle.

  “Take a look,” Nash said. “I’ll tell you more when we get on the plane.”

  The motorcade sped through the streets of New York.

  It was mid-morning, but the eight-car procession just raced through the soaking city streets, whipping through intersection after intersection, getting green lights all the way out of the city.

  They must have set the traffic lights like they did for the President when he visited New York, Race thought.

  But this was no presidential procession. The looks on the faces of the people on the sidewalk said it all.

  This was a different kind of motorcade.

  No limousines. No flapping flags. Just two black heavily armored Humvees hovering in the middle of a line of drab olive cars, slicing their way through the pouring rain.

  With his bodyguard seated beside him and his earpiece and throat mike now in place, Race stared out the window of the speeding Humvee.

  Not many people could claim to have experienced a clear passage out of New York City in the middle of the mid-morning rush, he thought. It was a strange experience; otherworldly. He began to wonder just how important this mission was.

  He opened the folder that Nash had given him. The first thing he saw was a list of names.

  CUZCO INVESTIGATION TEAM

  CIVILIAN MEMBERS

  1 NASH, Francis K—DARPA, project leader, nuclear physicist

  2 COPELAND, Troy B—DARPA, nuclear physicist

  3 O’CONNOR, Lauren M—DARPA, theoretical physicist

  4 CHAMBERS, Walter J—Stanford, anthropologist

  5 LOPEZ, Gabriela S—Princeton, archaeologist

  6 RACE, William H—NYU, linguist

  ARMED FORCES MEMBERS

  1 SCOTT, Dwayne T—United States Army (SF), Captain

  2 VAN LEWEN, Leonardo M—United States Army (SF), Sergeant

  3 COCHRANE, Jacob R—United States Army (SF), First Class Staff Sergeant

  4 REICHART, George P—United States Army (SF), Staff Sergeant

  5 WILSON, Charles T—United States Army (SF), Sergeant

  6 KENNEDY, Douglas K—United States Army (SF), Sergeant

  Race turned the page and saw a photocopy of a newspaper clipping. The headline was in French: MASSACRÉS DES MOINES AU MONASTÈRE DU HAUT DELA MONTAGNE.

  Race translated. “Monks massacred in mountaintop monastery.”

  He read the article. It was dated 3 January 1999—yesterday—and it was about a group of Jesuit monks who had been slaughtered inside their monastery high up in the French Pyrenees.

  French authorities believed it to be the work of Islamic fundamentalists protesting against French interference in Algeria. Eighteen monks in all had been killed, all of them shot at close quarters in the same manner as in previous fundamentalist slayings.

  Race turned to the next item in the folder.

  It was another newspaper clipping, this one from the Los Angeles Times. It was dated late last year and the headline screamed: FEDERAL OFFICIALS FOUND MURDERED IN ROCKIES.

  It said that two members of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had been found murdered in the mountains north of Helena, Montana. Both officials had been skinned. The FBI had been called in. They suspected that it was the work of one of the local militia groups who seemed to have a natural enmity toward any sort of Federal agency. It was thought that the two Wildlife officials had stumbled upon some militiamen hunting illegal game for their pelts. Instead of skinning the animals, the militiamen had skinned the rangers.

  Race winced, turned the page.

  The next sheet in the folder was a photocopy of an article from a university journal of some kind. The article was in German and it was written by a scientist named Albert L. Mueller. It was dated November 1998.

  Race scanned the article, rapidly translating the German in his head. It was something about a meteor crater that had been found in the jungles of Peru.

  Underneath the article on the meteor crater was a police pathologist’s report, also written in German. In the box marked “NAME OF DECEASED” were the words “ALBERT LUDWIG MUELLER.”

  Beneath the pathologist’s report were some more sheets of paper, all covered with various orange stamps—TOP SECRET; NOFORN; EYES ONLY; U.S. ARMY PERSONNEL EYES ONLY. Race flicked through them. Mostly, the sheets were filled with complex mathematical equations which meant nothing to him.

  Next, he saw a handful of memos, nearly all of them addressed to people he’d never heard of. On one of the memos, however, he saw his own name. It read:

  3 JAN 1999 22:01 US ARMY INTERNAL NET 617 5544 88211-05 NO. 139

  FROM: NASH, FRANK

  TO: ALL CUZCO TEAM MEMBERS

  SUBJECT: SUPERNOVA MISSION

  CONTACT TO BE MADE WITH RACE ASAP.

  PARTICIPATION CRUCIAL TO SUCCESS OF MISSION.

  EXPECT PACKAGE TO ARRIVE TOMORROW 4 JANUARY AT NEWARK AT 0945.

  ALL MEMBERS TO HAVE EQUIPMENT STOWED ON THE TRANSPORT BY 0900.

  The motorcade arrived at Newark airport. The long line of cars raced through a gate in the cyclone fence and quickly made its way to a private airstrip.

  An enormous grey camouflaged cargo plane stood on the tarmac waiting for them, its nose swung up to reveal a cargo loading ramp. As the motorcade pulled to a stop alongside the massive aircraft, Race saw a large Army truck being driven up the ramp into the nose of the plane.

  Led by Sergeant Van Lewen, he stepped out of the Humvee, into the rain. No sooner had he emerged from the big black vehicle, however, than he heard a monstrous roar from somewhere high above him.

  A white Lear jet with the word “ARMY” emblazoned on its tail came roaring in overhead and screeched to a landing on the wet tarmac in front of them.

  As Race watched the plane wheel around on the runway and taxi back in his direction, he felt Frank Nash grab him gently by the arm.

  “Come on,” Nash said, leading him toward the big cargo plane. “Everyone else is already on board.”

  As they approached the cargo plane, Race saw a woman appear in a doorway on its side. He recognized her instantly.

  “Hey, Will,” Lauren O’Connor said.

  “Hello, Lauren.”

  She was in her early thirties, but she didn’t look a day older than twenty-five. She’d cut her hair, Race saw. Back at USC, it had been long, wavy and brown. Now it was short, straight and auburn. Very late nineties.

  Her big brown eyes were still the same, though, as was her fresh clear skin. And standing there in the doorway to the big cargo plane—leaning casually against t
he frame with her arms folded and her hips cocked, dressed in heavy-duty khaki hiking gear—she looked the way she had always looked. Tall and sexy, lithe and athletic.

  “It’s been a long time,” she said, smiling.

  “Yes, it has,” Race said.

  “So. William Race. Expert linguist. Consultant to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. You still play ball, Will?”

  “Just socially,” Race said. Back in college, he’d lettered in football. He’d been the smallest guy on the team, but also the fastest. He’d lettered in track too.

  “How about you?” he said, noticing for the first time the ring on her left hand. He wondered who she’d married.

  “Well, for one thing,” she said, her eyes lighting up, “I’m very excited about this mission. It’s not every day you get to go on a treasure hunt.”

  “Is that what this is?”

  Before Lauren could answer, a loud whining sound made both of them turn.

  The Lear had pulled to a halt about fifty yards from the cargo plane and no sooner was its side door open than a soldier was leaping down onto the wet tarmac beneath it and running toward them, hunched over in the drenching rain. He carried a briefcase in his hand.

  The soldier came up to Nash, handed him the briefcase. “Doctor Nash,” he said. “The manuscript.”

  Nash took the briefcase and strode over to where Lauren and Race were standing.

  “All right,” he said, ushering them inside the cargo plane. “Time to get this show on the road.”

  The giant cargo plane thundered down the runway and lifted off into the rain-soaked sky.

  It was a Lockheed-Martin C-5 Galaxy and the interior was divided into two sections—the downstairs cargo hold and the upstairs passenger compartment. Race sat in the upstairs section with the five other scientists going along on the expedition. The six Green Berets accompanying them were down in the cargo hold, stowing and checking their weapons.

  Of the five civilians, Race knew two: Frank Nash and Lauren O’Connor.

  “We’ll have time for introductions later,” Nash said, sitting down next to Race and hauling the briefcase onto his lap. “What’s important right now is that we set you to work.”

  He began unclasping the buckles on the briefcase.

  “Can you tell me where we’re going now?” Race asked.

  “Oh yes, of course,” Nash said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before, but your office just wasn’t secure. The windows could have been lased.”

  “Lased?”

  “With a laser-guided listening device. When we speak inside an office like yours, our voices actually make the windows vibrate. Most modern office towers are equipped to deal with directional listening devices—they have electronic jamming signals running through the glass in their windows. Older buildings like yours don’t. It would have been way too easy for someone to listen in.”

  “So where are we going?”

  “Cuzco, Peru—capital of the Incan empire before the Spanish conquistadors arrived in 1532,” Nash said. “Now it’s just a large country town, a few Incan ruins, big tourist attraction, so they tell me. We’ll be traveling non-stop, with a couple of mid-air refuelings on the way.”

  He opened the briefcase and extracted something from it.

  It was a stack of paper—a loose pile of A3 sheets, maybe forty pages in total. Race saw the top sheet. It was a Xerox of an illustrated cover sheet.

  It was the manuscript Nash had spoken about earlier, or at least a photocopy of it.

  Nash handed the stack of paper over to Race and smiled. “This is why you are here.”

  Race took the pile from him, flipped over the cover sheet.

  Now, Race had seen medieval manuscripts before—manuscripts painstakingly reproduced by hand by devoted monks in the Middle Ages, back in the days before the printing press. Such manuscripts were characterized by an almost impossible intricacy of design and penmanship: perfect calligraphy—including wonderfully elaborate leading marks (the single letter that starts a new chapter)—and detailed pictographs in the margins that were designed to convey the mood of the work. Sunny and gay for pleasing books; dark and frightening for more somber tales. Such was the detail, it was said that a monk could spend his entire life reproducing a single manuscript

  But the manuscript that Race saw now—even in black-and-white photocopied form—was like nothing he had ever seen.

  It was magnificent.

  He flicked through the pages.

  The handwriting was superb, precise, intricate, and the side margins were filled with drawings of gnarled snaking vines. Strange stone structures, covered in moss and shadow, occupied the bottom corners of each page. The overall effect was one of darkness and foreboding, of brooding malevolence.

  Race flicked back to the cover page. It read:

  NARRATIO VERUS PRIESTO IN RURISINCARUS: OPERIS

  ALBERTO LUIS SANTIAGO ANNO DOMINI MDLXV

  Race translated. The true relation of a monk in the land of the Incas: A manuscript by Alberto Luis Santiago. It was dated 1565.

  Race turned to face Nash. “All right. I think it’s about time you told me what this mission of yours is all about”

  Nash explained.

  Brother Alberto Santiago had been a young Franciscan missionary sent to Peru in 1532 to work alongside the conquistadors. While the conquistadors raped and pillaged the countryside, monks like Santiago were expected to convert the Incan natives to the wisdom of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

  “Although it was written in 1565, well after Santiago’s eventual return to Europe,” Nash said, “it is said that the Santiago Manuscript recounts an incident that occurred around 1535, during the conquest of Peru by Francisco Pizarro and his conquistadors. According to medieval monks who claimed to have read it, the manuscript recounts a rather amazing tale: that of Hernando Pizarro’s dogged pursuit of an Incan prince who, during the height of the siege of Cuzco, spirited the Incas’ most venerated idol out of the walled city and fled with it into the jungles of eastern Peru.”

  Nash swiveled in his seat. “Walter,” he said, nodding to the bespectacled, balding man sitting on the other side of the center aisle, “help me out here. I’m telling Professor Race about the idol.”

  Walter Chambers got up from his seat and sat down opposite Race. Chambers was a mousy little man, three-quarters bald and bookish, the kind of guy who’d wear a bow tie to work.

  “William Race. Walter Chambers,” Nash said. “Walter’s an anthropologist from Stanford. Expert on Central and South American cultures—Mayans, Aztecs, Olmecs and, especially, the Incas.”

  Chambers smiled. “So you want to know about the idol?”

  “It would seem so,” Race said.

  “The Incas called it ‘the Spirit of the People,’ ” Chambers said. “It was a stone idol, but one that was carved out of a strange kind of stone, a shiny black stone that had very fine veins of purple running through it.

  “It was the Incan people’s most prized possession. Indeed, they saw it as their very heart and soul. And when I say that, I mean it literally. They saw the Spirit of the People as more than a mere symbol of their power. They saw it as the actual, literal, source of that power. And indeed, there were stories about its magical powers—how it could calm the most vicious of animals, or how, when dipped in water, the idol would sing.”

  “Sing?” Race said.

  “That’s right,” Chambers said, “sing.”

  “O-kay. So what does this idol look like?”

  “The idol’s actual appearance has been described in many places, including the two most comprehensive works on the conquest of Peru, Jéez’s Relación and de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries. But descriptions vary. Some say it was a foot high, others only six inches; some say it was beautifully carved and smooth to the touch, others say it had rough, sharp edges. One feature, however, is common to all descriptions of the idol—the Spirit of the People was carved in the shape of a snarling jaguar’s head.�
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  Chambers leaned forward in his seat. “From the moment he heard about that idol, Hernando Pizarro wanted it. And all the more so after the attendants at the idol’s shrine at Pachacámac whisked it away from under his nose. See, Hernando Pizarro was probably the most ruthless of all the Pizarro brothers to come to Peru. I imagine today we would call him a psychopath. According to some reports, he would torture whole villages on a whim—just for the sport of it. And his hunt for the idol became an obsession. Village after village, town after town, wherever he went he demanded to know the location of the idol. But no matter how many natives he tortured, no matter how many villages he burned, the Incas wouldn’t tell him where their precious idol was.

  “But then—somehow—in 1535 Hernando discovered where the idol was being kept. It was being kept in a massive stone vault inside the Coricancha, the famous Temple of the Sun, situated in the center of the besieged city of Cuzco.

  “Unfortunately for Hernando, he got to Cuzco just in time to see a young Incan prince named Renco Capac make off with the idol in a daring ride through the Spanish and Incan lines. According to those medieval monks who read it, the Santiago Manuscript details Hernando’s pursuit of Renco following the young prince’s escape from Cuzco—a dazzling chase that wound its way through the Andes and out into the Amazon rainforest.”

  “What the manuscript also allegedly does,” Nash said, “is reveal the final resting place of the Spirit of the People.”

  So they were after the idol, Race thought.

  He didn’t say anything, though. Mainly, because it just didn’t make sense.

  Why was the U.S. Army sending a team of nuclear physicists down to South America to find a lost Incan idol? And on the basis of a four-hundred-year-old Latin manuscript. They might as well have been following a pirate’s treasure map.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Nash said. “If someone had told me this same story a week ago, I’d have thought about it the same way you do. But then, up until a couple of weeks ago, nobody even knew where the Santiago Manuscript was.”